First things first
Our time and energy are increasingly used to manufacture demand, exploit populations, extract resources, fill landfills, pollute the air, promote colonization, and propel our planet’s sixth mass extinction.
We have helped to create comfortable, happy lives for some of our species and allowed harm to others; our designs, at times, serve to exclude, eliminate, and discriminate.
Many design teachers and professionals perpetuate this ideology; the markets reward it; a tide of imitations and “likes” reinforces it. Encouraged in this direction, designers then apply their skills and imagination to sell fast fashion, fast cars, and fast food; disposable cups, bubble wrap, and unending amounts of single-use plastics; fidget spinners, microwave dinners, and nose hair trimmers.
We market unhealthy body images and diets; products and apps that propagate social isolation and depression; the consumption of unbalanced food systems; we sell pills to pop, tiks to tok, and a scrolling feed that never stops… and then the desire to consume it all over again and again. Yes, commercial work has always paid the bills, but many designers have let it become, in large measure, what designers do. This, in turn, is how the world perceives design.
Many of us have grown increasingly uncomfortable with this view of design. Because of this, we call for a massive change in what and how designers design. Climate change is critically entangled with class, race, and gender-based dominance, we can no longer push for mere sustainability (pdf) but must create new systems that undo and heal what’s been done.
What We Must Do
- Challenge and examine the histories, processes, and ethics of design and develop new creative skills, resources, collaborations, and languages of design.
- Support community-based efforts of justice, healing, co-existence, and mutual respect.
- Understand that we are not outside of nature; we are a part of a complex system and our actions must reflect that knowledge.
- Reverse our profession’s priorities in favour of more inclusive, empathetic, and engaged forms of action — a mind-shift that goes beyond sustainability — towards regeneration, exploration, and co-creation of a non-exploitative, non-appropriative set of social-environmental relations.
- Commit to reconnecting design, manufacturing, distribution, and use of the things we design to the Earth — and all of its inhabitants.
- Direct our skills for the betterment of humanity towards a more ecological civilization.
- Advocate the reduction of design to a singular focus: this is not feasible. Nor do we want to take any of the fun out of life. But we are proposing a reversal of priorities in favour of more useful, generative, and equitable forms of design.
We believe all of these principles should be integrated into multidisciplinary design pedagogy.
In 1964, 22 visual communicators, young and old, signed the original call for our skills to be put to worthwhile use.
In 2000, 33 designers signed a revised version of the original call, and in 2014 — on the 50th anniversary of the manifesto — over 1600 designers around the world renewed their commitment to the First Things First Manifesto.
With the ongoing destruction of essential living systems on our planet, this message has only grown more urgent.
We renew the previous manifestos with a greater sense of urgency as we see the compounded effects of our climate crisis unfold before us. It is imperative that we take climate action now.
We believe the First Things First Manifesto should reflect collective thoughts on what the world needs and where design plays a role within that world.
Brain candy 🧠
Tools for Systems Thinkers: The 6 Fundamental Concepts of Systems Thinking
In this series on systems thinking, Leyla Acaroğlu shares the key insights and tools needed to develop and advance a systems mindset for dealing with complex problem solving and transitioning to the Circular Economy.
How Good Design Can Help Create a Circular Economy
Today’s linear economy extracts raw materials, produces, consumes, and discards with little consideration for the limited resources of our planet. So how can design help us accelerate the transition towards a new and circular economy?
Vera Rubin: The power of evidence-based visual thinking
Vera Rubin was a powerhouse in astrophysics, though she rarely gets the credit she deserves. Rubin is responsible for discovering dark matter, which makes up 84% of the material that exists in the universe.
Born in 1928, a young Vera became enthralled with space while staring at the stars outside her bedroom window. After receiving a full ride to Vassar College, Vera went on to study how galaxies move in space and found some unexpected results.
Rubin expected galaxies to move in the same way planets revolve around the sun. Objects closer to the sun move faster than those that are further away. However, using her keen observational skills, she discovered that all objects in a galaxy move at the same speed, no matter how far they are from the center.
Dark matter is responsible for this phenomenon, and Rubin’s discovery set the course for modern astronomy studies. Her approach to problem-solving and innovation holds many lessons for us today.
Confirmation Bias in UX
Confirmation bias can be seen as an instance of priming — our prior beliefs influence how we search for new information and distort how we interpret it. It is a cost-efficient way to understand the world — after all, it’s easier to stick with a hypothesis than to discard it and come up with another one instead.
Unboring and Easy to Get Guide To Deliberate Practice Theory
Created by the psychologist Anders Ericsson, the deliberate practice theory aims to debunk the myth about innate talent and explain how ordinary folks, too, can achieve extraordinary results.
This theory was developed after years of boring work of observation. Studying world-class athletes, musicians, chess players, etc. In other words, everyone who ever won a gold medal in the Olympics. Professor Ericsson was basically trying to figure out what one must do — what are the steps, the framework — to achieve expert performance, regardless of the field.
Design beyond deliverables
Digital products are more complex today than ever before. Creating them requires multiple team members and other stakeholders, each with their own set of skills and expertise. There is a lot of communication around design, and all the design deliverables that we produce are also aiming to support this communication.
However, when speaking to people who are not actively involved in what you are working on, abstract design deliverables hardly trigger discussion, and speeding up towards a visual output seems to be the only way to get an active contribution. However, leveraging a more concrete output means introducing too many design choices while still leaving a lot to speculation
How can we practice design without harming the Planet? 🌎
How can designers build eco-conscious design practices? What exactly is design’s role in the climate movement? And what other communities and industries should we look to for the way forward?
Right now, we are taking more than we give from the Earth. The way we’re working through the world’s resources is unsustainable and dangerous.
Ukraine in Literature 🇺🇦 📚
This selection of literature and nonfiction, compiled by writers and editors on The Times’s Books desk, can help you better understand Ukraine.
“Your Ad Could Go Here” by Oksana Zabuzhko. Short stories about Ukrainians facing personal and political inflection points, written by a famed public intellectual, veer into the surreal and supernatural.
“Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine” edited by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky. The anthology, which centers on fighting in Crimea and the Donbas, includes work from several Ukrainian poets.
“Absolute Zero” by Artem Chekh. A memoir from a Ukrainian novelist who fought in the Donbas region starting in 2015, the book incorporates perspectives of civilians and his fellow soldiers.
“The Gates of Europe” by Serhii Plokhy. This comprehensive overview of Ukraine, written by the director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, goes back centuries to explore the country’s history under different empires and its fight for independence.
— Thanks for reading.
I’m Bora, an independent designer exploring practical design knowledge, principles, design thinking frameworks, cognitive biases, and how to use design for good.
As designers, by expanding our knowledge, we can increase our impact.
